SELinux and confined users, make the Linux Desktop more secure

Pantherina@feddit.de to Linux@lemmy.ml – 104 points –
Security enthusiasts wanted: from beginners up to SELinux experts to make up the SELinux "Confined Users (SIG)" to foster Fedora's security capabilities
discussion.fedoraproject.org
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Is Fedora the only mainstream desktop distribution to ship with SELinux?

afaik yes, at least the arch kernel has selinux enabled, but you need to install the user space tools from the AUR.

I'm not aware of another one. Some other distros like Ubuntu and OpenSUSE ship AppArmor instead, which does similar things but isn't considered quite as secure.

I know plenty of other popular distros don't ship any Mandatory Access Control system at all which seems like a very bad security practice to me. Same thing with Firewalls.

Nitpick: it's not that AppArmor isn't as secure, it's just that SELinux is more powerful. The security always is up to the profiles.
If you were to compare the policies for Fedora and e.g. Debian, I would assume Fedora has better ones though lol

For sure. I believe Debian's AppArmor integration is a little bit of an afterthought and there's lots of patches missing as Canonical likes to keep many improvements downstream.

yeah, same. I am currently on NixOS, but looking to move away because it's lacking support any MAC. I really love NixOS and it's declarative approach to things, but i can't live with such a large security hole in my home Network.

As soon as i find a Distro that has MAC and allows for at least semi-declarative configuration, i am switching. But being able to declare an env/dconf setting in my config and sync it across all devices is just too powerful

I suggest you check Silverblue + Ansible (or CoreOS/IoT for server stuff).

while i think that ansible is really cool, it's not the same as Nix.

correct me if i'm wrong, but afaik Ansible just modifies the current state of the System with a declarative configuration.

Nix reverts your system back to install and then applies the configuration. The result is that in Nix if i remove something from the configuration.nix it is as if it never existed, whereas on Ansible it stays unless i manually run a task to uninstall it.